Five Minutes With Night's Child
by Angel Leviathan
Summary: She isn't afraid of the dark.


**Title:** Five Minutes With Night's Child

 **Author:** Angel Leviathan

 **Summary:** She isn't afraid of the dark.

 **Notes:** Follows 'The Husbands of River Song' and the fic 'Five Moments With Night's Child'.

* * *

Her room changes when she least expects it. It never changes its location, but sometimes the colour of the walls alters, the pictures with it, and sometimes she goes to bed at night to discover star charts washed across her ceiling.

Her mother tells her that the TARDIS loves her, but she shouldn't take advantage. She never _asks_ for the changes to happen. She doesn't silently plead for new toys or paintwork, or wish that she had a _better_ room. She learnt her lesson when she was very little and pushing her boundaries, and even her father wouldn't wade in and convince the TARDIS to take away all the rainbows and hearts and flowers.

She knows that she will never want for encouragement or comfort or what she truly needs. When her Gallifreyan lessons go badly, the TARDIS traces the same patterns on the walls and helps her deconstruct what she struggles with. She shows her pictures of her grandparents. The TARDIS looks after her, but she refuses to let her have her own way simply because she _could_.

Her mother jokes that maybe the TARDIS is trying to achieve with her what she didn't quite manage with her father.

* * *

Her mother doesn't sing – ever.

Her father is the one armed with lullabies and nonsense rhymes and all sorts, though she's not sure that she's ever going to appreciate the electric guitar. Perhaps it's just as well, for he's not played it within her hearing since the time that he sat down with her and guided her through the first few notes of a melody that she'd heard him play time and time again, muttering to himself under his breath.

The tune was pleasing enough. Happy, even. But when they got through that first handful of notes, she couldn't help but burst into tears and ask, "Where's she gone?" for reasons she couldn't explain to herself, let alone him.

She still remembers how he tensed and the music died, and how he left her there on the floor, though not without pressing a kiss to the top of her head. As his shadow left the room, her mother swept through the doorway and lifted her into her arms, promising her all was well.

Her mother loves music. She knows that. She adores the towers (who wouldn't?). But she knows that one question she'll never ask is why she doesn't sing.

* * *

She isn't afraid of the dark.

How could she be? Darillium's night is cool and comforting, and she learns later than most to look for a sun in a bright sky. The first time that she witnesses dawn on some distant world, she expresses a distaste for it and dismisses its supposed beauty, choosing instead to ensconce herself in her father's lap and rummage through his jacket pockets for the psychic paper she's been practicing with.

Her mother watches the dawn with a sombre edge that she cannot brighten, no matter how many ridiculous things she manages to think of to introduce herself as, paper provided as evidence. Oh, Mummy _smiles_ , but it never reaches her eyes, and so she eventually decides to plant herself down in _her_ lap instead and snuggles close.

It only takes a few seconds before her father shuffles over a bit and folds himself around them both, his arms encircling her mother's waist. He whispers something to her that she doesn't quite catch, but her mother yields a low chuckle and tips her head back to press a kiss to his cheek.

She decides that day that, no, she doesn't like the dawn at all.

* * *

The man is rambling on in a way that's getting her father's back up, but it's her mother's reaction that she finds the most confusing. She knows her mother is afraid (she can't explain why, but she _knows_ , just like she knows when the TARDIS is angry with her father), but not afraid for herself, and the more frightened she gets, the more she laughs and pokes fun at him.

She sinks back around the corner she's peeking out from when she feels that cold gaze slip past her father's shoulder and near her hiding place.

All she hears is silence. Then footsteps. The low clatter of something hitting the ground. She peers out again and desperately tries to swallow down the tears and the alarm, because they're _leaving her on her own_ , but then her gaze finds her mother's sonic screwdriver.

She waits, then scrambles for it, trembling hands fumbling for the right setting.

She only sobs when the TARDIS has materialised around her, and by the time her parents make it back (in one piece), she's done her crying and is nothing but the brave little girl she wants them to see.

She's learnt a lot from them.

* * *

Darillium relies primarily on tourism to keep going, what it has to offer aside from the towers mostly imports from across the universe, its own produce jealously guarded by those who consider themselves the natives. The polite fiction that there's no black market for highly-coveted crystal shards is just that – fiction.

So, when her mother threads a slim, crystal necklace around her neck, she's a little suspicious about its origins. And what it actually _is_. She's too accustomed to decorative items having more than one function to really trust that it's just something _pretty_.

She must be giving her mother that _look_ she claims she has, for she laughs warmly and promises, "It's not the least bit sonic. Just a little bit..."

"Illegal, River?" is her father's dry addition to the moment that he's been pretending to ignore.

"Unique."

She lifts a hand to touch the tiny clusters of crystal shards that lie along the silver chain and thinks of the towers with a pang of guilt she finds surprisingly easy to suppress. Darillium is her home. She has a right to it.

A glance at her father is all it takes for him to know whose side she's taken.

 **Fin**


End file.
